Abi James, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Southampton Ron Stewart Managing Consultant, Altformats Solutions Teresa Haven, Accessibility Analyst, Northern Arizona University Solutions for using STEM based curricular materials

1.Current Campus situation 2.You and Math 3.Standards and Guidelines 4.Coffee! 5.A.T Solutions for support STEM 6.Creating Accessible STEM Agenda

Economics Business Biology When they get to college …do students expect math?

Which subject is this form? Manage- ment

Textbook screen shot from? Philosophy

Engineering Chemistry Some students might anticipate math content…

Meteorology Math Students that want to do math….

“Mathematics: The only true universal language” New Scientist, Feb 2009 “Mathematics is the only language shared by all human beings regardless of culture, religion, or gender.” But can it be accessible? Mathematics – the universal language?

Some users may want to –Zoom / re-size –Change colour, contrast –Search, index –Braille rendering –Use keyboard to navigate to and through content –Read aloud content with or without highlighting Typical Accessibility Requirements

So who needs accessible math? What A.T. do we need to support?

“ A student is struggling with dealing with the spreadsheet of numbers as she has narrow vision. So she can see selected bits - but makes it a challenge seeing the big picture and trends” “When I’m doing maths problems I make careless errors and can’t spot them. So x 2 becomes 2x when I turn the page. If I cross things out I don’t know if its part of solving the equation or my workings” The challenge…. Not just screen reading

The difference between maths & text

Symbols in maths can mean different things: [AB] -1 Could be read as: “left parenthesis, boldface capital a, boldface capital b, right parenthesis, superscript minus one” OR “inverse of the matrix product, boldface capital a, boldface capital b” Talking Maths: difference between math & text

Math: non-linear representation & ambiguity

Accurate reading of maths:

If possible to drill down into the semantics of an equation then Audio representation of the notation may be more valuable & put less strain on their working memory capacity However, mathematical semantics may have consistent notation but not a consistent vocabulary. Need to consider context and localisation Mathematical semantics

Context and localisation example

Then there are symbols

WCAG “5.7 Markup and style sheets rather than images” WCAG-COGA cognitive working group covering maths difficulties HTML5 & ePub3 using MathML Guidelines on images e.g Diagram Centre Image Description Guidelines 2015 Diagram Centre Image Description Guidelines 2015 Guidelines on converting LaTeX to accessible formats University of Bath processUniversity of Bath process STEM Standards & Guidelines: What should we be doing?

Standards to test against? Techniques for accessibility solutions? Assistive tools to test with? How can we make STEM accessible without…

Technical Standards Content Standards Encoding Standards Content Type-set Viewer Assistive Technology. What is needed for Interoperability?